1944年,艾弗里通过肺炎双球菌转化实验证明了DNA是遗传物质,从而使人们对基因的认识有了根本性改变。在20世纪70年代,尽管转座子的存在已被证明,但大多数科学家都认为基因是连续排列在DNA上的一段有功能的片段(转座子插入破坏了这种完整性而使基因失活),然而1977年两位科学家“基因内不编码序列(内含子)”的独立发现使传统的基因概念发生了动摇,大大推动了分子生物学的迅猛发展。 In 1944, Avery through the transformation of pneumococcus test proved that DNA is a genetic material, so that people have a fundamental change in understanding of the gene. Although the existence of transposons has been proven in the 1970s, most scientists consider the gene to be a functional segment that is continuously arranged on the DNA (transposon insertion destroys this integrity and causes loss of the gene However, the independent discovery made by two scientists in 1977 that the “non-coding sequence of genes (introns)” caused the traditional concept of gene to have shaken and greatly promoted the rapid development of molecular biology.